


Fire and Ash

by Alchemine



Category: Party Animals (TV)
Genre: Disasters, Explosions, Fire, Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-06-19
Updated: 2021-01-19
Packaged: 2021-03-03 21:27:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 6,760
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24812305
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Alchemine/pseuds/Alchemine
Summary: After an unexplained late-night explosion, Jo and Danny are left on their own to escape from a damaged building.
Comments: 19
Kudos: 41





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I started writing this for myself a long time ago, then posted part of it on Tumblr, and now I'm moving updates over here for the 6.5 other people who are Party Animals fans. 
> 
> As always, disclaimer that I'm not an expert in anything, including physics.

They were in Jo’s office when the blast came, an earsplitting bang followed by a deep, thunderous roar that filled every molecule of the air. Danny, in the midst of passing a document across the desk to show her, didn't notice as it fell from his hand. The floor rose up and lurched to one side as if a huge carpet had been yanked from underneath the entire building, knocking him over and throwing Jo out of her chair. 

“Danny!”

Jo’s voice was muffled, but the part of his brain that was programmed to respond to her picked it up anyway, and acted automatically. On hands and knees, he scrambled around to the other side of the desk, and she grabbed him by the sleeve and pulled him next to her in the open space underneath. Dust and grit rained down less than an arm’s length away, stinging exposed skin and infiltrating their lungs. He turned Jo’s face against his shoulder to shield her from it, then hunched over her in an attempt to protect himself as well. There was nothing else they could do except wait. 

He was braced for the possibility of at least a partial collapse—the ceiling caving in and burying them under rubble, the concrete slab underneath the building crumbling and dropping them into Westminster tube station—but after twenty or so very long seconds, the rumbling and shaking stopped, with a few smaller booms and a final shower of tiles and insulation from the ceiling. The overhead light panel and Jo’s desk lamp both went dead, followed almost at once by the bluish-white emergency lights coming on. 

“All right, Jo?” 

“I’m fine.” Jo held onto him for a moment longer and then pushed herself away, turning to cough into the crook of her elbow. “What about you?” 

“I’m OK. What the hell was that?” 

“Some sort of explosion,” Jo said. “I saw flames reflected in the window before you got to me. They’re gone now, but they were there.”

“Bombing? Or something else?” 

“I don’t know. We’ve got to get out of here and find out.” 

She crawled out from underneath the desk, and Danny followed her. The office was more in disarray than badly damaged; there were books scattered everywhere, pictures had fallen from the walls, and the window glass had a long crack running from midpoint to upper right corner, but the walls were still standing and the gaps where the ceiling tiles had fallen looked stable enough. Danny laid his hand flat on the closed door, remembering Scott’s warnings about fires, and then opened it onto a similar scene in the outer office, where his filing cabinet had tipped over and spewed a snowstorm of paper across the floor. 

“It’s so quiet,” Jo said. Her face was sickly pale and strained in the emergency light. “What's happened to the fire alarm? And we ought to be hearing people out in the corridor.” 

He looked at his watch. “It’s late, there probably aren’t many people left. Do you want to wait here for someone to come? There’ll be rescue crews on their way; even if the alarm system hasn't kicked in, no one could have missed that blast.” 

“No, I want to go. We can always come back if we need to.” 

“All right. I’ll get my laptop—“

“Leave it,” Jo said. “It’ll only get in the way. I don’t think anyone’s out to steal your research notes at the moment.” 

They went out into the corridor, full of smashed tiles and fallen oil paintings, and along to the lifts, which they found stopped and empty, one at floor level and one below, with its doors half-open. Inside the lower car, just visible through the gap between the floor and the top of the doors, was a single high-heeled shoe, which made Danny look nervously at Jo.

She shook her head. “It’s not what you’re thinking. Look, even in this light you can see it’s clean in there—no blood or blast marks or anything. Whoever that shoe belongs to lost it, that’s all, trying to get out in a hurry.” 

“Okay,” Danny said, “but we’re not getting in.” 

“Obviously not,” Jo said, and then paused. “Do you smell that?” 

He sniffed the air and caught a distinct whiff of something hot and chemical, like melting plastic or smouldering insulation. “Yeah. I think you’re right and we need to go now. Stairs?”

“Stairs.” She coughed again, not even trying to stifle it this time. “I’m all right. It’s only the dust. Come on.” 

The stairwell was just around the corner from the lifts, and when they got there, they found its door twisted and hanging askew from the upper hinge. Danny nudged it farther open and peered in. 

“Oh shit.” 

“What?” 

“The stairs are gone.” 

“Let me see.” 

Jo pushed in next to him, and they both stared down at a tangled mess of splintered wood and concrete rubble, with a cloud of unidentified particulate matter slowly settling around it. The emergency light just inside the stairwell door was still burning, but with a sputtering flicker that didn’t bode well for its future. The light at the next landing was shattered and useless. A black, jagged hole led from the remains of the landing into an echoing abyss. 

Danny looked over at Jo, who had the lapel of her blazer pulled across her mouth and nose as an impromptu dust mask. “Now what?” 

“Dial 999,” she said, muffled. “We can at least let them know where to look for us.” 

He fumbled his phone out of his pocket and flipped it open. “No service. Can you?” 

“No service on mine either. Let’s try a landline.” 

They backtracked along the corridor to their office suite, the smell of overheated chemicals getting stronger as they went, and Danny checked the phone on his desk and then the one on Jo’s, finding both of them silent and dead. As he set down the second receiver, they heard a faint wail of sirens outside, almost too distant to be audible. At the same moment, a delicate wisp of smoke curled out through the nearest metal grille, and Jo started to cough again, in ugly, racking paroxysms that came from somewhere deep in her chest. 

He touched her shoulder, tentatively. “Are you sure you’re all right?” 

“Yes,” Jo said between coughs. Her eyes were streaming with involuntary tears, and Danny could feel his own lungs starting to burn with whatever toxic mixture of substances was being drawn through the building’s passive ventilation system. “But not for much longer. It’s worse here. We’ve got to go back to the stairs to wait.” 

The corridor was hazy, but not choked with smoke yet, and they were able to return to the smashed stairwell door easily enough. Danny looked at it, looked at Jo, still wheezing from her coughing spasm, and pushed his way inside. 

“What do you think you're doing?” Jo grabbed his upper arm with an iron grip. “It’s not even a little bit safe in there.” 

“I just want to look. I’ll be careful.” 

He advanced cautiously onto the landing, testing his weight against its strength with every step, as Jo watched him from the open doorway. The vertical column of the stairwell rose above his head, black as a chimney, and he thought about how many times he’d run up and down it during the day, when the building was bustling and humming and alive with busy people, all worrying over their next meeting or the project they’d just been handed. Now it felt like a graveyard, which made him wonder, with a shudder, if there were any bodies lying limp and broken on the floors above or below. Surely there weren’t, though. He and Jo had stayed late, and even they had been about to call it a night and head home. 

“That’s enough, Danny.” Jo was trying for the tone of command she used when she wanted instant compliance from him, but in the dark it just sounded shaky and scared. “Come back before you fall and break your neck.” 

“I’m all right.” He frowned at the wreck of the stairs heading up to the next level, and then inched forward and inspected the hole. “Jo, the steps underneath us? The ones that lead down from three to two? I think they’re still there.” 

“So? Even if they are, there’s no way to reach them.” 

“There might be. Let me see your phone; it’s got a brighter light than mine has.” 

He reached back without looking, and Jo pressed her iPhone into his hand, her fingers icy cold against his. “Thanks.” 

“Can you see anything?” 

Danny strained his eyes, searching the depths. “Yeah. The first two or three steps are blocked, but the ones below those look fine. Is there something I can toss in to check?” 

Jo ventured a bit farther onto the landing and dug around in the rubble, then handed him a chunk of wood that looked as if it had once been part of a handrail. He dropped it into the hole, and they both listened as it clattered its way down the next flight of stairs. 

“Seems all right.” He glanced at Jo, who was white-faced but still hanging on to her composure, and swallowed hard. “Okay, we can do this. I’ll go first and then you come down after. It’s not that far.” 

“How do you know the stairs are still strong enough to support us? We both weigh more than a piece of scrap wood.” 

“They’ll have to be,” Danny said. “My chest’s starting to hurt and so is my head. I don’t know what’s burning, but it can’t be good for us. Here—” He gave her phone back to her. “Give me some light so I can see where I’m going.” 

He held onto the rim of the hole, digging his fingers into soft plaster and insulation and wires, and slowly lowered himself until he could drop to the first undamaged step. It was farther than he’d thought, looking at it from up high, and he lost his balance as he landed and fell hard on one knee, with a crunch that felt like bare bone on concrete and sent a red-hot flare of pain all the way up to his hip. He didn’t want to yell and upset Jo, but he couldn’t stop a groan that he hoped she wouldn’t hear from escaping through his clenched teeth. 

“It’s all right,” he called up when he thought he could keep his voice even. “Hang on the way I did and lower yourself down as far as you can, and I’ll help with the last part.” 

“I don’t like heights,” Jo said faintly from above. She edged just close enough to the hole for him to see the top half of her face, with dark, liquid eyes and a smudge of something black across her forehead. “I get dizzy.” 

Danny thought back to a flight they’d taken together to Canada, when she’d refused to let him open the window shade as they were passing over Greenland. “Okay, I get that, Jo, but I don’t think you’ve got a choice. The air’s lots better down here, for one thing. And I can’t come back up again, so you’ve got to join me unless you want to leave me on my own. You don’t want to do that, do you?”

“Of course not, but if I fall—”

“I’d throw myself off the top of the building before I’d let you fall.” Somewhere high over their heads, there was a creak and then an echoing crash, as if some precariously attached bit of masonry had just let go. His knee stopped stinging and started to throb as if it was thinking about swelling up. “Please come down. I swear I’ll catch you.” 

“All right.” 

He heard rustling sounds, and then Jo sat down and wriggled forward until her legs were dangling through the hole. She turned herself around, gripped its rim in the same place where he’d held on, and stopped for a moment, head bowed. 

“What’s the matter?”

“Nothing. I thought I needed to cough again. Are you ready?” 

“Ready,” Danny said, and she slid over the edge. Her skirt caught on it and slid up nearly to the tops of her thighs, which under other circumstances might have embarrassed him, but he was so focused on the task at hand he barely noticed. Once she’d begun, she came slithering down fast, and he caught her around the middle and lowered her to the step beside him. 

“See? Easy peasy.”

“Easy for you, maybe.” Jo’s whole body was stiff and unyielding with tension under his hands, but she seemed in no hurry to be released. At last she shuddered all over and drew away from him. “I don’t want to have to do that again. I hope you’re right about the stairs.” 

“Me too. How’s your battery?”

She pressed a button and the iPhone lit up, casting gruesome shadows that hollowed out her eyes and threw the lines round her mouth into sharp relief. “Forty-two percent. The torch app drains it fast, though.” 

“Maybe we won’t need it all the way there,” Danny said. He didn’t want to think about what would happen if the light went out for good when they were halfway down an unstable stairway covered in rubble, but the thought was there in his head nevertheless. He was already beginning to regret convincing Jo to come down here with him, but given that the alternative had been both of them choking to death on smoke and chemical fumes, it hadn’t been much of a choice. 

“Well, there’s only one way to find out,” Jo said. 

She switched on the LED light and shone it ahead of them, revealing a line of stair treads disappearing into the dark on their way to the floor below. One or two were broken, and all were thick with dust and strewn with shattered fragments of ceiling tiles and wood panelling, but they looked as solid up close as they had from above. Danny took a step towards them and grunted as the pain in his knee flared. 

“What’s the matter?” 

“Landed the wrong way when I dropped.” 

“Your ankle?”

“Knee. It’s all right.” 

“It doesn’t sound as if it’s all right.” Jo swung the light around, aimed it low. “Let me look.” 

Obediently, Danny turned up his trouser leg and showed her the red, abraded skin that would blossom into a crop of blue and purple bruises in a day or two. The idea that he might not live long enough for that to happen—that neither of them might—crossed his mind, but he kept it to himself. 

“It’s bleeding a bit.” She knelt down and, lacking anything else, pressed the edge of her sleeve to the injury, making him yelp. “And swelling. Can you walk on it?” 

“Could we stay here even if I couldn’t?” 

Jo pointed the flash at the opening they’d come through, where a pall of smoke was now lazily drifting in to fill the gap. “I don’t think so. Remember that report we read on building fires? In a shaft like this, there’s nothing stopping smoke from coming down as well as going up, and if the sprinklers have done their job in whichever zone the fire's in, it'll only make things smokier. We’ve got to try to get out—” A cough caught her off guard, and she thrust the iPhone at Danny to hold while she got it under control. “Out onto this floor and hope there’s better reception there. Fire and rescue have got to be somewhere in the building by now.” 

Danny wasn’t so certain about that—it had only been a few minutes since they’d heard the first sirens—but he trained the light on the door that led into the warren of corridors comprising the third-floor offices, and Jo touched it gingerly to test for heat before pushing the panic bar. The bar retracted as usual, with a clash of metal on metal that echoed up and down the stairwell, but the door itself didn’t budge; either it was stuck, or something was blocking it from the other side. He thought of bodies again, piled up where they’d fallen on top of each other while trying to escape, and shivered. Not that. Please. 

“Oh come _on_.” Jo banged the bar hard with the heels of both hands, then half-turned and drove her hip into it. “ _Fuck_. Help me, Danny.” 

“Hang on.” He slipped the phone into his breast pocket with the LED facing out before coming over to join her. The door rattled a little in its fittings as they both strained against it, but stayed shut. 

“Brilliant.” Jo pushed her hair out of her face, smearing the black smudge farther across her forehead. Damp strands of hair were stuck to her temples, and he realised he was perspiring as well; they’d exerted themselves with the door, but the air around them was also heating up, slowly but steadily. “Absolutely splendid. Remind me to file a complaint with someone in charge of building codes as soon as we’re out of here.” 

“Consider it filed.” 

“Christ, what a mess,” Jo said wearily, and stopped again to cough, one hand pressed to her lower right ribs. “Is your knee still hurting?”

“Yeah.” 

“We’ve got to keep going anyway.” 

“I know,” Danny said. “And fast. Battery’s down to thirty-one percent.” 

“Already?” She grimaced. “All right, let’s go. You can lean on me if you need to.” 

“How’re you going to hold me up?” 

“I’ll find a way,” Jo said. “You wouldn’t leave me behind. I won’t leave you either.” 

Scared and exhausted and injured as he was, this simple declaration still touched him. Jo formed alliances and exchanged favours on the daily in pursuit of her goals, and she was as good as her word, but it was rare for her to give her real, personal loyalty to anyone. He’d always assumed he had it, as she had his, but hearing her say so was enough to warm him while they made their way down the first two steps in the next staircase. 

As they reached the third step, there was a rushing, crackling noise above, and a shower of debris came down, knocking them both off balance and sending them half tumbling, half sliding down the next several steps. Grabbing at anything to stop the fall was out of the question; all he could do was hope he wouldn’t reach the next landing headfirst and fracture his skull or his neck. 

Before he got there, the edge of a stair tread slammed into his damaged knee, lighting up the traumatised nerve endings like fireworks. He screamed with pain and twisted around involuntarily, which turned out to be just enough to stop his downward trajectory. An instant later, Jo fetched up hard against him. She was a slightly built woman, but momentum gave her the force of a backhoe loaded with bricks, and for a terrible moment he thought they were going to go the rest of the way down in a tangle of arms and legs. He braced himself and managed to hold on until she groaned and sat up. 

“Danny?” Jo was out of breath, but not too much for him to hear the rising panic in her voice. She scrabbled around for her iPhone, found it on the step below, pointed the light at him with shaking hands that turned it into a strobe. “Are you hurt?” 

“I smashed my knee again, but other than that I’m alright. You?” 

“Same, I think.” She turned the light on herself to show him. Her hair was caked with dust and a long scratch ran along one side of her face, from just below her left eye to the angle of her jaw, but the rest of her looked whole.

“I think so too.” Danny straightened his legs out in front of him and immediately paid the price with a wave of pain rolling up from his knee. He’d played youth league football until he was fifteen and knew the difference between a serious injury and one you could walk off, and that repeat blow had clearly bumped this one up to the first category. It frightened him, but not as much as the thin streamers of smoke he could see swirling in the LED. “It could have been worse. At least whatever fell on us wasn’t actually on fire.” 

“Nothing like optimism, hey?” Jo shone the light's beam downward. “We’ve still got to make it to the next level. If you can’t stand up, go down sitting. That’s what Clem—” Her voice wavered. “That’s what he did before he could climb.” 

“If it worked for him, it’ll work for me," Danny said. "Can you clear off the steps? I don’t want an arse full of slivers and nails.” 

Jo went down the remaining steps ahead of him, sweeping broken boards and rubble out of the way, and then he braced himself on his arms and bumped along until he reached the landing. When he got there, Jo hooked her hands underneath his armpits and pulled, and he added to her efforts by pushing off from the floor with his good foot. With that assistance, she dragged him the short distance to the nearest wall, where she turned up his trouser leg again and crouched down to inspect his knee. 

“It feels three times the size it ought to be—Jesus, be careful!” Danny flinched as she touched the swelling, with fingertips that were somehow cool even though she and he were now both sweating buckets. It felt hotter than the rest of his body, pulsating like some sort of horrible poison-bloated alien egg sac in a sci-fi film. 

“I am being careful, and it’s not that swollen. Not yet, anyway." She took her hand away and sat back on her heels. "I wonder if we can wrap it in something to stop it swelling any more, and to stabilise it a bit.” 

“Too bad this isn’t a hundred years ago,” Danny said. “You could tear strips off your petticoat like a proper Florence Nightingale.” 

“Unless you've got a time machine I don't know about, Daniel, I think we're stuck with what's on hand. Or on foot, in this case.” Jo put the iPhone down on its face, light pointing up, and started undoing one of his shoelaces. “If we’re going to complain about each other’s sartorial choices, it’s a shame you’re not wearing some nice long football socks.” 

“They’re festering at the bottom of my wardrobe as we speak. Here, you do the one on the bad side, I’ll do the other one.” 

He stripped off his socks, and Jo tied them together with a square knot, creating a makeshift bandage that was long enough to wrap round his knee twice before tying it again. The strapping didn’t take the pain away, but it stopped the steady, sinister ballooning sensation, and after he’d put his shoes back on bare feet, he found he could stand again, at least temporarily. His head was pounding, and there was a strong possibility he might be sick soon, but he could keep going and that was all that mattered for the moment. 

“Better?” Jo asked, watching him. 

“Yeah." She looked as bad as he felt, he thought. He wanted them both away from here and in a clean, safe hospital where she could have oxygen and fluids and nurses to look after her, and where he could mainline some opioids. 

“Good. Come on before the smoke gets any worse. We'll try the door again at the next landing.” 

"Have we still got battery left?" 

Jo checked it. "Twenty-seven percent. It'll be all right if we hurry." 


	2. Chapter 2

They’d agreed to hurry, but hurrying turned into picking their way down the next flight of stairs, with the light trained on each step to look out for anything that might trip them up. Danny was worried about leaning too hard on Jo, whose breathing had developed a faint but definite wheeze with each inhalation, but he couldn’t do without at least some support from her. At the midway point, he tugged at her arm to stop her. 

“What?” 

“I need a rest, and I want to look you over.” 

“Why?” Jo asked suspiciously.

“Because you sound like a broken concertina. Keep still a moment.” He shifted the light and inspected her face, drawn and tense under the sweat-streaked dirt and dust. 

“Do you see anything?” 

“You’re a gorgeous shade of blue. Pantone six-six-two.” He lowered the phone. “Not really. I’m no expert, but your colour looks alright, at least. Do you feel light-headed at all?” 

“No, just out of breath. Stop fussing, we haven’t got time for it.” She fumbled for his hand, found it, and pointed the light at the next landing, only a few steps below them. “There’s hardly any damage at this level. I hope that means we can open the door.”

“Me too,” Danny said. His knee was a throbbing ball of pain, hot and tight and swollen, but at the same time something inside it felt horribly loose and untethered. “Am I too heavy on you?”

“You’re all right.” Jo shifted position, linked her arm round his waist. “I’ll tell you when it’s too much.”

"Will you really?" 

“Probably not.” 

"That's what I thought." 

With no other option, he let more of his weight rest on her as they shuffled the rest of the way down, until he felt her start to buckle under it and eased up a little. At the landing, he propped himself against the wall with one hand and reached for the panic bar on the door with the other, but Jo stopped him. 

“You’ll fall over. Let me do it.” 

She pushed, and the door swung open, giving onto an emergency-lit corridor lined with public meeting rooms. On the other side was the same slightly stale office atmosphere they both breathed every day, smelling of carpet and paint and the artificial air freshener the cleaners seemed to use by the barrel full, but compared to the stairwell, it was as cool and pure as a spring morning in the countryside. Danny drew in a great, joyful draught of it and Jo did the same beside him, then doubled over with another coughing fit. 

“We’re not out yet,” she said when it subsided. 

“Which way do you want to go?” 

“Ah…” Jo coughed again, a thick, wet, choking sound this time. "Don't look at me."

Danny averted his eyes, staring at a streaky abstract painting in shades of red and brown that had fallen from the wall opposite, and heard her spit something onto the floor.

"You OK?" 

"Sorry. I know it’s disgusting. I couldn't help it." Jo cleared her throat. "I don't come this way often, but if we bear to the right we'll come out at the upper cloister level, won't we? I don't know what's to the left." 

"Stairs to the service corridor," Danny said. "I got told off once for using it as a shortcut. If we go out to the cloister, though, we can get down into the courtyard and then out through the entrance hall." 

"Fair enough," Jo said. "Let's go before your leg falls off or I cough out a lung." 

Still leaning on her, Danny limped along the corridor, through another door at its far end, and out onto the open staircase that led down into the courtyard. The crisscrossing steel ribs that made up the overhead vault’s superstructure were still intact, and so was the double row of fig trees below them, but the floor was an ocean of broken glass where the ceiling panes had either collapsed or been shattered by falling debris. Beyond the just-visible security checkpoint through the archway to the entrance hall, lights flashed in lurid red and blue, distant as another country. 

"Shit." Danny gestured towards Jo’s low-heeled shoes and exposed ankles. “How are you going to walk through that?”

“How are you?"

"Good question." He let go of her and brushed glass fragments away from the handrail of the staircase so he could hold onto that instead. "Suppose we just sit here and yell for help until someone comes and fetches us, or try phoning again if one of us has service? We're out in the open--" 

"Not open enough." She broke off, struggling to hold in a cough. "God, my head--" 

"What's the matter with it?"

"Splitting," Jo said succinctly. "I don't think we ought to wait, Danny. Even if the fire's not spreading, there could be another blast." She reached over, hooked her iPhone out of his breast pocket, switched off the torch app and checked the time. "It's been twenty-one minutes since the first one. If I were setting explosives, I wouldn't do only one charge. I'd do two, and time them just far apart enough so the rescuers would be in the building when the second one went off, just the way they probably are now." 

"That's _horrible_ ," Danny said, appalled. 

"But effective." Jo looked up at him, and in the moonlight pouring through the ruined ceiling he saw a dark trickle of blood that had crept from one side of her nose onto her upper lip. He didn't know whether it was a souvenir of their header down the steps that he hadn't noticed before, or whether she'd ruptured a tiny vessel in the last coughing fit, but it alarmed him almost as much as the thought of another explosion. He wanted to sit down more than he'd ever wanted anything--sit and perhaps never move again--but reluctantly he let go of the handrail. 

"What's it going to be, then?" 

Jo gazed out across the expanse of glass, absentmindedly sniffing and wiping the blood away from her lip with the back of one hand. "I'd rather not risk that. If one of us slips, we'll both be mince. Where would we come out if we backtracked and went down and through the service corridor?" 

"It runs behind the coffee shop and one of the restaurants, so there must be doors that open to the outside, for carrying deliveries in and getting rid of rubbish. Between this building and the gym probably, where they've got those orange barriers with guards in the daytime." 

"All right," Jo said, "the service corridor it is." 


	3. Chapter 3

With the decision taken, Danny followed Jo back to the door they’d come through at the fastest hobble he could manage. It opened without a hitch, but trying to be careful of his knee made him clumsy. He stumbled over the abrupt transition from smooth floor to carpeting, and Jo caught and steadied him. 

“Stay with me, Danny.” Her grip on his arm tightened until his elbow dug into the soft swell of her breast, but she held on and kept him upright. “You’re the one who knows the way to go from here, remember.”

‘“I know.” He squinted along the corridor. The air was still fresher here than it had been in the internal stairwell, but warmer than the atrium with its ceiling open to the winter sky. Sweat that had cooled on his skin began to itch and prickle in a low, irritating counterpoint to his aches and pains. His throat was raw with smoke as well, though probably nothing compared to how Jo’s must feel. For a fleeting instant, he thought about not just sitting down, but actually lying on the floor and closing his eyes. He and Jo were both so tired. A rest would do them good—

“ _Daniel_.” Jo pinched him, a sharp little nip to his inner arm that brought him instantly back into focus. 

“Jesus! Are you trying to kill me before this building can?” 

“Of course not.” She rubbed the spot briefly to soothe the sting. “But you can’t drift off like that. If we slow down too much or get confused, we’re done for. How far along do we need to go?” 

“To the other end, past where we came in. Then down one flight of stairs and through the service corridor until we find a way out. I didn't go very far the one time I tried to use it, so I've never seen where the exits are. They can't be too hard to find, though.”

“Assuming the service corridor’s not on fire or collapsed.” 

“For fuck’s sake, Jo. This was your idea.” 

“I know,” Jo said. “But we may as well be prepared for all the possibilities. If we can’t get out, then we’ll come back and take our chances with the glass.”

Danny looked down at his knee, strapped into its ersatz brace. Above and below the lashed-together socks, his trouser legs were filthy; the left one was torn, revealing a gash on his shin that he hoped hadn’t been made by anything rusty.

“I’m not sure I’ll be able to come back,” he admitted. “I can get down the stairs, but I don’t think I can climb them again.”

“That’s all right. I’ll go first and check it’s safe before you make the trip.” Jo coughed, then let go of him and touched a fresh dribble of blood from her nose. “Ugh. I’d kill for a tissue.” 

“Hold it closed until it stops,” Danny advised her. “Scott had a nosebleed every week when we were kids. Mum said she ought to get him a clothes peg to wear.”

He broke off as a cracking, splintering noise came from the atrium behind them, followed by the crash of shattering glass. It was a huge sound, as if a giant had put its massive boot through the surface of a frozen lake. Jo, who had been trying to stop the bleeding using Danny's suggestion, left off at once and pushed past him, opening the door just enough to peer out.

“What was it?”

“Another one of those big ceiling panes fell,” Jo said grimly. “Thank God we weren’t underneath when it happened.” She let the door click shut. “Never mind my nose. We’ve got to keep moving.”

The blue emergency lights in this corridor were just above floor level, evenly spaced along either side like an airport landing strip. Danny kept his eyes fixed on them, hoping to avoid tripping over his own feet again, and counted the dozen steps between each one under his breath: _one-two-three-four-five-six_ , halfway there, _seven-eight-nine-ten-eleven-twelve_ , start again. At the far end, he leaned against the wall next to the service door for support as Jo examined the black plastic square of an electronic card reader.

“No light. The lock must have released when the power cut off.” She pulled the handle and looked into the stairwell, which had block walls and sealed concrete steps rather than the blandly tasteful wood of the main passageways. “I can see the corridor entrance from here. I’ll go down and then come straight back for you.”

“OK, but be careful.”

“That’s rich coming from someone who took a blind leap into a hole in the floor less than half an hour ago,” Jo said. “Don’t move. I won’t be a minute.”

Thinking he could hardly have moved even if he'd wanted to, Danny gave her a thumbs-up and watched her go down, keeping one hand on the railing for safety's sake. She was limping as well, he saw, and wondered if she’d even noticed it in her urgency to get them both out. Probably not. Single-minded determination was as fundamental a part of the Joanne Porter design as brown eyes and a blazing hot temper.

Jo reached the bottom of the stairs, opened the second door, glanced to either side, then stepped all the way through and disappeared from his view. Left alone in the gloom, he found he could hear muted noise from elsewhere in the building: thumps that could have been footsteps or falling debris, a faint sound that might have been a voice calling out, sirens on one of the roads outside. He’d been expecting rescue crews to burst in ever since the explosion, and in this moment of stillness he was able to ponder where they were and why they hadn’t appeared yet. Based on the reflected lights he’d seen earlier, he thought they must have set up operations somewhere in the road opposite the tours ticket office, but he had no mental picture of where they would enter from there if not through the atrium.

While he was thinking about it, Jo reappeared and came up to join him, pausing once to cough. 

“I walked along the corridor a bit, just to be sure of the way. Left is a dead end, so we'll have to bear right.” She took hold of his arm again. “Has having a rest helped at all?”

Danny tried a step and winced. “Not really, but we're almost there, right? Onwards and upwards. Well, downwards. You know.”

The service corridor was as utilitarian as the stairs that led to it, but it was also undamaged and easy to navigate, even on his injured knee. They turned right as soon as they entered, and within a minute found a door, labelled only with a metal plate marked "S5."

"What's that mean?"

"Only one way to find out." Jo pulled the door open and shone her light across a mop and bucket; a folding floor sign; wire shelves that held cartons of toilet roll and paper towels. A plastic jug, knocked over by the explosion, rolled towards them as if it wanted to escape too, and she kicked it back in.

“Just storage. Next one.”

The next door, S6, led into the kitchen area of the restaurant, smelling of lemon-scented floor cleaner and damp sponges and a whiff of boiled vegetables that reminded Danny of school dinners. It was dark and silent, littered with thick white shards of dishes that had toppled from their stacks to smash on the draining board and in the deep sink.

“We can’t get out this way either, only back into the atrium.” He saw a broken bottle surrounded by a pool of cooking oil on the floor and took an awkward hop backwards to avoid it, forcing Jo to move with him. “S7's got to be the coffee shop if S6 is the restaurant. Think we ought to try the next one on from there?" 

"Yes—shit—not _now_ —" Jo slapped at the screen on her phone as it went dark and the LED winked out. "I was sure I had enough battery to last a little longer. Christ, the timing."

"It doesn't matter." He pulled her towards the corridor as firmly as he could without losing his balance. "Look, S7's just there and S8's on the other side. Help me get there." 

The little of Jo's face he could see looked as if she wanted to throw the phone against a wall, but she stuffed it into the nearest available pocket and took a better grip on him, supporting him along the short distance to the S8 door. It opened onto another corridor with the same hard industrial flooring and featureless painted walls that looked even more blank and washed out in the cold blue light. 

"Do you think?" He glanced down at Jo, who nodded.

"There's a draught, can't you feel it? There must be a door to the outside somewhere close by."

Overwhelmed with hope, Danny managed to put on some additional speed—it was probably tearing hell out of the last remaining shred of cartilage in his knee, but who gave a fuck—until they rounded a curve and saw a green sign with an arrow, informing them that this was indeed the WAY OUT. A moment later, they arrived at a double set of doors, wider than usual and equipped with metal rods to prop them open for bins and trolleys during operating hours. Icy air seeped in around the gaps, and Jo started to cough violently as it reached her abused lungs. 

"It's OK, I'm all right, let's go." 

She pressed one arm across her side to ease the pain of coughing, and put out her free hand to push the bar on the door closest to her. Before she could touch it, there was a rumble, and the ground convulsed under their feet. 


End file.
